Day 7 of 2025 baseball book reviews: Maybelle, Why Can’t You Be True

“All The Way: The Life of
Baseball Trailblazer Maybelle Blair”

The author: Kat D. Williams
The details: Rowman & Littlefield, $32, 192 pages, released March 18, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.

A review in 90 feet or less

The Shrine of the Eternals’ 2025 official ballot allows nine names to be filled from 40 eligible candidates. The top three will draw induction later this year into the Shrine as per rules of The Baseball Reliquary, which has done this now since 1999 years.

Of the candidates, six-and-a-half are women.

* Mamie “Peanut” Johnson is the only female pitcher in the Negro Leagues, after being rejected by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League because of the color of her skin.

* Melissa Ludtke is a sports writer who just came out with “Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside,” based on winning a lawsuit against Major League Baseball for locker room access going back to the 1977 World Series.

* Morganna Roberts was “The Kissing Bandit,” who turned a challenge by friends into a celebrity activity of running on to the field and planting a kiss on a player, manager, umpire or even the San Diego Chicken. It warranted numerous trespassing charges and even a stay in an Anaheim jail. She is still with us, at 78 years old, known as Morgana Cottrell. There should be a book on her … seems it would be rather robust.

* Annie Savoy is a piece of work.

Fictitious work, that is, created by Ron Shelton for his 1988 movie “Bull Durham,” with the famous line: “Baseball is the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in and day out.” She gets her due in Shelton’s 2023 book, “The Church of Baseball.” Which we enjoyed reviewing and, in the process, creating a neat relationship with Ron.

* Janet Marie Smith is an architect and urban planner best known for Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, but also for extensive upgrades done at Dodger Stadium over a 10-year period as the franchise’s executive vice president for planning and development. She should eventually write a story about her experiences. A title suggestion: “Built By Janet.”

* Helen Callaghan goes in as a co-entry with her son, Casey Candaele. They are the only mother-son combination to play professional baseball. Helen St. Aubuin was a star in the All-American Girls Professional League and the inspiration for “A League of Their Own” 1986 film. She had her son, Casey, at age 38 in 1961 in Lompoc, and he had a nine-year MLB career from1986 to 1997 in Montreal, Houston and Cleveland as an infielder and outfielder.

Alphabetically, Maybelle Blair is listed first among that female subset on the ballot.

A first as well in other areas.

Technically, another All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player — a right-handed pitcher released after one game in 1948 by the Peoria Redwings after an injury — Blair was better known as someone who did things to give women’s baseball a voice and a sound bite.

There are only five women in the Shrine of the Eternals — Rachel Robinson (2014), Ila Borders (2003), Nancy Faust (2018), Lisa Fernandez (2019) and Pam Postema (2000). That’s five out of 69 inductees.

Could this book help “All The Way” May’s case for, at the very least, a Shrine recognition?

Based on a lot of other aspects of her life, surely. And please, don’t call me Shirley.

Kat Williams, a professor of American history specializing in U.S. women’s sports at Marshall University, did The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives, and Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star. She is also the CEO of the International Women’s Baseball Center, dedicated to the preservation and future of women in baseball. Blair is also an advocate for the International Women’s Baseball Center these days.

As such, Blair has capitalized on the story that she’s the inspiration for the character “All The Way” Mae Mordabito, played by Madonna, in the 1992 film “A League of their Own.” Blair became a consultant on the Amazon series that followed up the movie decades later. She used that platform a few years ago when, at age 95, she came out, saying she was done with hiding her identity for nearly a century. It was also done at an event promoting the streaming service’s series.

Better late than never. Better then than when no one was paying attention.

Having turned 98 last January, Blair is most noticeable when she shows up for appearances and ceremonial first pitch ceremonies because of her large sport goggle sunglasses, white bouffant hair, a loud jersey and a cane fashioned from a baseball bat (the kind USC’s Rod Dedeaux used to sport).

She does herself, and the sport, well in this role.

Born in Inglewood, and living in Redondo Beach when she was recruited to play in the AAGP followed by the pro softball circuit, Blair first went to Compton JC then L.A. School of Physiotherapy to work in a treatment center in L.A.

She was diverted to a 37-year career at Northrup Corporation in El Segundo. Starting as a driver, she became a manager of transportation. Again, one of the few women with such a title of “manager” at the aerospace joint, but again, it was likely based on her personality and willingness to be a people please.

Blair gravitates to people almost quicker than people gravitate to her. The book will be her calling card.

How it goes in the scorebook

A flair single to right field.

There was a 2024 story on MLB.com posted with the title: “These women broke barriers in baseball” and, against all odds, the story still exists despite what MLB has done complying with anything that appears to be DEI related.

All the way down the list, we thought we may spot Maybelle Blair, but … a tip of the cap to Jenny Cavnar, Sarah Gelles, Ronnie Gajownik, Olivia Pichardo, Rachel Balkovec, Kelsie Whitmore, Genevieve Beacom, Sara Goodrum, Biance Smith, Kim Ng, Alyssa Nakken, Rachel Folden, Andrea Hayden, Raquel Ferriera, Justine Siegal, Jessica Mendoza, Mo’Ne Davis, Eri Yoshida, Effa Manley, Jean Afterman, Ila Borders, Elaine Weddington Steward, Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, Edith Houghton, Amada Hopkins, Jackie Mitchell, Lizzie Murphy and Lizzie Arlington.

That’s some kind of lineup. And Blair isn’t included because, frankly, that’s not a list where she fits.

Blair definitely is a character of the game, like Morganna. She is an architect and refurbisher of storytelling. She got to pitch in the women’s pro league and know the locker room. She’s generally the real deal, not fiction.

The book — which is really an extended magazine piece with a cool retro cover and very small typeface — reflects all that.

A trailblazer? We’ll give her some of that. It’s her story, and she can stick with it, somehow making it to fill 100 pages (so that’s your tell right there, as padding is needed to go along with acknowledgments, appendix, author’s note, more notes, author oral history list, index and about the author.

And as for our 2025 Shrine of the Eternal ballot: Janet Marie Smith, Callaghan/Candaele and Melissa Ludtke made it on.

You can look it up: More to ponder

== The new Women’s Pro Baseball League will hold tryouts this July and August, with signups open until May 7. Blair was named Honorary Chair of the WPBL Advisory Board — again, for her celebrity and availability. For more information on the WPBL: www.womensprobaseballleague.com. 

== Mainly because she is one of the few still around from the AAGP, Maybelle Blair is included in the multi-media project “Baseball Pioneers: True Stories of Guts and Glory As Told by Pioneering Men and Women of the Game,” a book version edited by Jon Leonoudakis and Kelly Holtzclaw for their “The Sweet Spot: A Treasury of Baseball Stories” documentary series (Facetious Publishing, released in 2018). “Salty, opinionated and a great storyteller, Maybelle Blair tells it like it is with a sparkle in her eye and a song in her heart for her one true love: baseball,” the editors concur.

== “Leveling the Playing Field: Women Breaking Barriers in Major League Baseball Coaching and Leadership,” by Al Lautenslager (Morgan James Publishing, 226 pages, $19.95, released Feb. 4, 2025) Best available at Barnes & Noble.